Estimating Code-Switching on Twitter with a Novel Generalized Word-Level Language Detection Technique

Shruti Rijhwani, Royal Sequiera, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali, Chandra Shekhar Maddila


Abstract
Word-level language detection is necessary for analyzing code-switched text, where multiple languages could be mixed within a sentence. Existing models are restricted to code-switching between two specific languages and fail in real-world scenarios as text input rarely has a priori information on the languages used. We present a novel unsupervised word-level language detection technique for code-switched text for an arbitrarily large number of languages, which does not require any manually annotated training data. Our experiments with tweets in seven languages show a 74% relative error reduction in word-level labeling with respect to competitive baselines. We then use this system to conduct a large-scale quantitative analysis of code-switching patterns on Twitter, both global as well as region-specific, with 58M tweets.
Anthology ID:
P17-1180
Volume:
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Regina Barzilay, Min-Yen Kan
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1971–1982
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P17-1180
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P17-1180
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shruti Rijhwani, Royal Sequiera, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali, and Chandra Shekhar Maddila. 2017. Estimating Code-Switching on Twitter with a Novel Generalized Word-Level Language Detection Technique. In Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1971–1982, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Estimating Code-Switching on Twitter with a Novel Generalized Word-Level Language Detection Technique (Rijhwani et al., ACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/P17-1180.pdf
Note:
 P17-1180.Notes.pdf